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THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
organs of sense are merely channels for the passage of vibrations from the world ; they do not, in any sense, constitute a factory for the manufacturing of will, consciousness, and reason. The eyes may be wide open, yet if the mind is engaged elsewhere they will see nothing; the ears may be physically perfect, but if the mind is not attached to them they will hear nothing; and so forth.
It follows from this that the power of perception is not, in any sense, a product of the sense-organs, but inheres in the soul. Hence, the separation of the soul from the physical body, in death, would not interfere, in any way, with the perceptive faculty, though its development in the future life, or lives, will depend on the nature of the new environment, just as it does here on the quality of the brain and nervous matter. Add to this the conclusion already arrived at--that thinking and reasoning are not the functions of the physical brain, but of spirit-and the case for the survival of the soul becomes perfectly clear and incontrovertible.
It would not be out of place to point out, while we are still on the subject, that the error of materialism is due to its supposition that a soul would be no soul unless it remained in one and the same state always and under all conditions, so that the consciousness which is affected by musk, coffee and the like, cannot but be a product of matter. This erroneous impression has probably derived encouragement from the teachings of certain cheap and easy-going systems of religious metaphysics which actually regard the living essence as unchanging and not liable to be affected by matter. There can, however, be no greater error than that implied in the supposition ; for
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